"This was the best Conservative conference for years." Indeed it was and the great bulk of delegates showed how much they felt it too, raising their voices to the roof of the Winter Gardens in chorus after chorus of Land Of Hope And Glory. Flags, funny hats - it looked like the last night of the proms. United as not for many a year, impassioned and full of hope, they are a party at last at ease with itself, certain of their direction, agreed on the values that bind them tight together. At last this party now knows who they are and where they are going. They are indeed the true representatives of the forces of conservatism. Or, to put it another way, representatives of a maximum of 30% of the voters, going absolutely nowhere.

William Hague is a good Wizard of Oz. In his speech he gave out the green spectacles to all his party loyalists and they are ecstatically happy in them: they like what they see through them and he gave them what they most crave, a wider still and wider English channel. This was the most Europhobic speech yet from any Conservative leader, a remarkable piece of narrow nationalism, rising to a crescendo of Europhobia as everyone knew it must. Filthy foreign food was being imported. Filthy foreign lorries would be made to pay special taxes on our roads (illegal). Britain would sign no more euro treaties unless compliance was optional (impossible). The flags, the singing and the hats were blatantly for Britain Out! That maddening slogan "In Europe, not run by Europe" pleased them no end, yet it signifies nothing, since we too are that selfsame Europe: Europe is not other, but ourselves.

"If you believe in an independent Britain then come with me, and I will give you back your country," he ended. This is where the party has been yearning to go, straining at the leash for all the Major years, while Major hauled weakly on its collar to keep it back. But the dog is off and away, bounding after the hare that is headed for the precipice. Or perhaps this is the charge of the Light Brigade: noble, heroic, mad and suicidal. Theirs not to reason why, they are charging straight into the cannons of the next century. Or maybe they are the Polish cavalry charging Hitler's tanks. (The cavalry had considered converting to tanks some years earlier, but decided not to because it would destroy the horse-breeding business, for which read the Countryside Alliance.)

There is something touching about people who follow their convictions and their traditions with such loyalty, without regard to anything as vulgar as electability. Not for them the focus group. And yet this week they did publish an elaborate document called Listening To Britain, following meetings William Hague has held up and down the country. He says in the introduction that when he became leader "I promised that never again would we let ourselves get out of touch with the British people". What were the results of all this listening, seductively arrayed this week to bring home the Conservative lost sheep voters? What were the touchstones that raised the greatest cheers? Fox hunting, beef on the bone, General Pinochet, the Territorial Army, hereditary peers, gays in the military, all the last hurrahs of yesteryear. Who can they have been listening to? Themselves, presumably, the party that surveys show is extremely aged and less than averagely educated: only 5% are under 35.

In this "best conference ever", what else did the public see to entice them back into the blue fold? The night of the living dead: a rabid Margaret Thatcher, madder than ever, a Tebbit so full of bile he looked as if he might burn up in his own acid, Redwood and Widdecombe both fascinatingly weird. Otherwise there was just a row of the unrecognisable. (You should have heard the bewildered cries of journalists in the press room watching the monitors: Who's that? Whatsisname?) Yes, there were two famous and admired Tories, those old centregound rebels, Kenneth Clarke and Michael Heseltine, but their interpretation of "common sense" enrages their party. How sharply they stood out in that land of Oz, but the denizens of Oz hissed them in the conference corridors. How they reminded the outside world of the Conservative party that might have been, but never was.

This is the end. Her Majesty has no opposition. They are so profoundly and utterly unelectable that they leave a great empty space at the heart of democracy. However, they do truly represent the forces of conservatism, a legitimate voice, an omnipresent strand of thought in every society. There will always be a place for them. But for as long as they look remotely like this nationalistic rump of geriatric flag-waving fanatics we can quietly forget them for now. In the glory days, the Conservative party was a grand coalition of folk like these, moderated by sensible business interests and a young middle England yearning for opportunity and modernity not then found with Labour. The trick was to combine traditionalism with an image of competent modern management. No longer. Only the hardcore deeply reactionary remain, an irony with so young a leader.

As the world moves on, somewhere between a quarter and a third of the people may always be nostalgic, tugging on the hands of the clock, afraid of the new and voting for any party that promises a better yesterday. For them society is always on the slide, getting worse, dumbing down, in moral decline. When was the perfect time, the golden age? Sometime around their grandfather's day: even in classical times, conservative writers thought their forebears better than themselves. Illiberal, they long for discipline. All Hague's rhetoric about too much regulation actually goes over the heads of this bunch. They want Churchill, authority, obedience, conformity, and above all, "Englishness". Bring back the Home and Colonial and queuing at the bacon slicer.

What could ever give them a taste of government again? Only proportional represen- tation and coalition with others less eccentric, but in their present ideological state it will probably take them a couple more election disasters before it dawns on them. Or perhaps they will entirely recreate themselves, once Europe is a dead issue and their Europhobia is finally vanquished. In the past the Conservative party has been a chameleon, dedicated to just one cause: power. David Willetts's optimistic pamphlet analysing how the Tories picked themselves up from defeat in 1906 and 1945 misses the point. The Conservatives have never been here before. They are no longer the same party because they have lost that lethal instinct to rule, their mission to govern is spent. Where once they were true believers in themselves, now they have fallen into the grip of a nationalist cult, true believers in a chimera, as doomed as the people of Waco or Jonestown.